Hacking

I mentioned that a more elaborate approach was required for our young man in the Stress Office, Mark Overton. I was tasked with bringing him up to speed with Patran and I wanted it to run at my pace, mainly because I was juggling three FEA projects and training involved the one terminal that we had.

Mark was arrogant, that was for sure and somewhat of an upper class twit, probably misunderstood by the incumbants, yet an irritant because of his quick fire "I know that" type comments on almost every topic. It was at times as though he was gracing the world with his attendance, sighing and rolling his eyes if a simple concept of P/A or M/Z was discussed (whatever that means).

I noticed over a period of days that journal files were appearing in my subdirectory, a by product of running Patran, however, I knew that I had not actually run them, so it was a bit of a puzzle.

It was the first time I had been hacked and it appeared that Mark or "Mooto" as we had nicknamed him was the culprit and was using my files for some reason to advance his knowledge, I wasn't against that, it was just the sneaky manner that was annoying and the fact that some files could become corrupted in the process.

This started a covert operation to undermine his covert operation.

Mooto had an alphanumeric password on his stuff, smart guy, so I set a trace program running that would record his keystrokes one day, it would not record his password however, but all I needed was a text file showing him logging on and accessing his files and directories.

The next step was a simple master directory move, which I could do as an administrator, I took his entire world and moved it to another, hidden directory, on the system. I then created an empty directory in the original area, with the same name as the moved directory and placed a modified, time stamped, trace output file above it.

It was on purpose to make it look like during overtime I had hacked into his passworded directory using a "special" program, the trace output mirrored his log on text and directory access (showing all his files) and then I had added a sequence of commands that indicated that the files and subdirectories had been deleted, even down to some "are you sure" type echoes.

The last few lines were a cleanup operation where I removed the special program, but unfortunately "forgot" to delete the telltale journal file...

It was something that drove the boy nuts over the next few days.